Blue velvet? Cadbury’s Wispa (1981).

WISPA

It’s a lazy journalist’s dream: a chocolate bar from the 1980s that was a triumph of marketing over substance. The Wispa’s Aero-meets-Flake texture didn’t exactly spark a confectionery revolution when the fluffy ingot made its debut in the Tyne Tees area. What raised eyebrows were the TV ads: wry chunks of two-handed banter between famous celebs of the day. Even so, it wasn’t a Zeitgeist-surfing triumph from the off. Picking the stars of Dad’s Army and The Sweeney was an odd gambit in the days before retro chic turned every old brown sitcom into a nostalgic goldmine, while the choice of the third show, Shoestring, was just plain weird. A shabby regional detective with mental health issues – he’ll tell us what to eat, right, kids? By the time of the bar’s nationwide roll-out two years later, they’d perfected a more contemporary line-up: It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Yes, Minister may not have been trendy, but they were at least current, and the Hi-De-Hi ad, with Ruth Madoc and Simon Cadell in full sexually charged character, but cannily using each other’s real names to avoid legal hassles, tapped a rich seam of chocoroticism mined further by Paul Nicholas and Jan Francis, and real-life bedfellows Rula Lenska and Dennis Waterman, set off by the nudge-nudge strapline ‘Bite it and believe it’.

By the end of the decade, Cadbury were packing the edgier likes of Peter Cook and Mel Smith off to ramble in front of a black cloth at Shepperton Studios, under the banner ‘You’re thinking chocolate, you’re talking Wispa’, while Noel Edmonds, rather worryingly, demanded, ‘Know someone who just has to keep doing it?’ While all this was going on, the brand diversified into the sickly Wispa Gold, the Wispa Mint and the biscuity Wispa Bite. This expansionism proved a bit much, as sales declined through the ’90s, until all varieties were discontinued in 2003. But you can’t keep a good marketing man down, and within a few years Cadbury, overwhelmed by ‘grassroots public demand’, reinstated the bar following a suspiciously well-orchestrated Internet campaign. This is what’s known in the trade as ‘doing an Arctic Roll’.